Seven Stanford faculty
elected to National Academy of Sciences

Seven Stanford faculty members have been elected to the
National Academy of Sciences (NAS). They are among 72 new members
and 18 foreign associates selected April 29 for distinguished and
continuing achievements in original research.

Established by a congressional act in 1863, NAS is a private
organization of scientists and engineers whose 1,922 active members
are dedicated to the furtherance of science and its use for the
general welfare. Upon request, the academy advises the federal
government on matters of science and technology.

Election to NAS is one of the highest honors that can be
accorded a U.S. scientist or engineer.

This year's election brings the total number of Stanford
faculty serving on the academy to 133, plus an additional three
affiliated with the Hoover Institution.

Stanford's new NAS members follow:

Yakov Eliashberg, professor of mathematics, is a
leading geometer who has done fundamental work in symplectic
geometry, complex analysis and singularity theory. He is a founder
of the new and rapidly developing field of symplectic topology,
employed to solve long-standing problems in classical mechanics and
geometric optics, particularly about the existence and stability of
periodic orbits of mechanical systems. In recent years, he and
others have discovered deep connections between symplectic topology
and other areas of mathematics and theoretical physics, such as
differential topology and string theory.

Eliashberg obtained his doctoral degree at Leningrad
University in 1972, the same year he joined Syktyvkar University in
the northern Soviet Union as an associate professor. He became
chair of the math department in 1975. He lost that position in 1979
when he became a "refusenik" -- that is, he was refused permission
to emigrate to the United States to join family members. From 1981
to 1987, despite many difficulties while heading a computer
software group, Eliashberg continued his mathematical research, and
in 1986 he was invited to speak in Berkeley, Calif., at the
International Congress of Mathematicians. As he was not allowed to
leave the former Soviet Union, his lecture was read for him at that
congress. In 1988, he emigrated with his family to the United
States and spent a year at the Mathematical Sciences Research
Institute in Berkeley before joining the Stanford faculty in 1989.
He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995 and was awarded the
Oswald Veblen Prize in 2001 from the American Mathematical
Society.

Richard G. Klein, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass
Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, researches
archeological and fossil evidence for the evolution of human
behavior. He has done fieldwork in Spain and South Africa, where he
has excavated ancient sites and analyzed the excavated materials
since 1969. A faculty member in the Department of Anthropological
Sciences, Klein has focused on the behavioral changes that allowed
anatomically modern Africans about 50,000 years ago to spread to
Eurasia, where they dominated or replaced the Neanderthals and
other non-modern Eurasians.

Klein has published articles on all aspects of human evolution
and two books, including The Human Career: Human Biological and
Cultural Origins (1999), which is aimed at professional
paleoanthropologists and their students, and The Dawn of Human
Culture (2002), written for non-specialists. After earning an
undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan, Klein went to
the University of Chicago to earn his master's and doctoral
degrees. Afterward, Klein taught at the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Northwestern University, the University of
Washington, and for 20 years at the University of Chicago. In 1993,
he joined Stanford's faculty. Klein has sat on numerous editorial
boards and has edited the Journal of Archaeological Science
since 1981. He is a scientific trustee of the L. S. B. Leakey
Foundation and a member of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences. He was elected president of the South African
Archaeological Society in 2002.

William D. Nix of the Materials Science and Engineering
Department is the Lee Otterson Professor in the School of
Engineering. His research interests include the mechanical
properties of bulk materials, thin films and nanostructures, and
the atomic-scale imperfections that control these properties.
Current projects focus on the development of experimental
techniques for the study of stresses and mechanical properties of
thin films and nanowires and on the modeling of these properties.
He is also engaged in research on the mechanical properties of bulk
metallic glasses.

Nix
received a bachelor's degree in metallurgical engineering from San
Jose State College in 1959, a master's degree in metallurgical
engineering from Stanford in 1960 and a doctorate in materials
science from Stanford in 1963. A member of the National Academy of
Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, he was the Institute of Metals Lecturer and recipient of
the Robert Franklin Mehl Award from the Metallurgical Society in
1988, the Acta Metallurgica Gold Medal in 1993, the Educator Award
from the Metallurgical Society in 1995 and the American Society for
Metals (ASM) Gold Medal from ASM International in 1998. In 2003, he
received the Albert Easton White Distinguished Teacher Award from
ASM International.

Helen Quinn, a theoretical physicist at the Stanford
Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), has made important contributions
toward unifying the strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions
into a single coherent model of particle physics. In 2000, she
shared the Dirac Medal and Prize for this work. After the
suggestion that these three distinct interactions were unified into
a single mathematical structure, Quinn -- with Howard Georgi and
Steven Weinberg -- used this idea to compute the relative strengths
of the three interactions. These ratios are now measured precisely
in high-energy experiments. With Roberto Peccei, she solved the
knotty question of why the weak interactions show small
particle-antiparticle asymmetries, while these effects are not seen
in purely strong or electromagnetic phenomena. Their theory
predicts a new particle that is a leading candidate for the
identity of the cosmological dark matter. More recently, Quinn
developed basic analysis methods used to search for the origin of
particle-antiparticle asymmetry in nature.

A
driving force in developing education and outreach programs for the
public and science teachers, Quinn played a key role in the
development of an interactive web-based explanation of particle
physics (http://particleadventure.org/particleadventure). After
receiving her doctorate from Stanford in 1967, she held a
postdoctoral position at Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron in
Hamburg, Germany, then served as a research fellow at Harvard in
1971; she joined the faculty there in 1972. She returned to
Stanford in 1976 as a visitor on a Sloan Fellowship and joined the
staff at SLAC in 1977. She is a vice chair of the American Physical
Society and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences.

Claude M. Steele, the Lucie Stern Professor in the
Social Sciences, has been a psychology professor at Stanford since
1991. Before that he was a faculty member at the universities of
Michigan, Washington and Utah. Throughout his career, Steele has
been interested in processes of self-evaluation, in particular in
how people cope with self-image threat. This work has led to a
general theory of self-affirmation processes. He is also interested
in a theory of how group stereotypes -- by posing an extra
self-evaluative and belongingness threat to such groups as African
Americans in all academic domains and women in quantitative domains
-- can influence intellectual performance and academic identities.
Furthermore, he has long been interested in addictive behaviors,
particularly alcohol addiction, where his work with several
colleagues has led to a theory of "alcohol myopia," which posits
that many of alcohol's social and stress-reducing effects --
effects that may underlie its addictive capacity -- are explained
as a consequence of alcohol's narrowing of perceptual and cognitive
functioning.

Steele received his bachelor's degree from Hiram College in
Ohio and his doctorate in psychology from Ohio State University. He
has served as president of the Society for Personality and Social
Psychology and as president of the Western Psychological
Association, among other senior positions in his field. He is a
member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the
National Academy of Education, and is the recipient of a Cattell
Faculty Fellowship and the Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations
Prize. Steele is past chair of the Department of
Psychology.

Brian A. Wandell, the Isaac and Madeline Stein Family
Professor, has been a faculty member in the Department of
Psychology since 1979. He holds courtesy appointments in
neurosciences and electrical engineering. He earned a bachelor's
degree from the University of Michigan and a doctorate in social
science from the University of California-Irvine.

Wandell's research includes image system engineering and
visual neuroscience. He co-founded the university's Image Systems
Engineering Program. Wandell and his students study a variety of
topics in digital imaging, including the design of image sensors,
high dynamic range displays and software simulations of the digital
imaging pipeline. Wandell's work in visual neuroscience uses both
functional magnetic resonance imaging and behavioral testing to
understand the action of the visual portions of the brain. His team
has developed tools to analyze signals in the brain that are
essential for perceiving color and motion, and the researchers are
working to apply these tools to understand visual signals in the
developing brain during the period when children learn to recognize
letters and words.

Wandell has taught courses on behavior, perception, cognitive
and behavioral neuroscience, image systems and computational
neuroimaging. He is the author of numerous articles and the vision
science textbook Foundations of Vision (1995). He is an
editor of several academic journals, has served as a consultant and
technical advisor for a number of corporations and has patented
some of the products of his work. In 1986, he won the Troland
Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences for his work
in color vision. In 1997, he received the Edridge-Green Medal in
Opthalmology for his work in visual neuroscience. In 2000, he was
awarded the Macbeth Prize from the Inter-Society Color
Council.

Paul A. Wender, the Francis W. Bergstrom Professor of
Chemistry and professor, by courtesy, of molecular pharmacology,
leads an interdisciplinary research program with a special emphasis
on the design and development of new reactions and strategies that
introduce fundamentally novel ways of synthesizing medically
significant agents -- such as bryostatin, now in human clinical
trials for the treatment of cancer. Among his other areas of
research are drug design and delivery, organometallic chemistry and
photochemistry.

Wender earned a Bachelor of Science degree at Wilkes College
in 1969 and a doctoral degree from Yale University in 1973,
followed by a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellowship
at Columbia University. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, Wender is the recipient of numerous professional honors:
the 1988 Ernest Guenther Award; the 1988 ICI Pharmaceutical Group's
Stuart Award for Excellence in Chemistry; the 1990 Arthur C. Cope
Scholar Award; the 1991 Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung Award; the
1995 Pfizer Research Award for Synthetic Organic Chemistry; the
1998 American Chemical Society (ACS) Award for Creative Work in
Synthetic Organic Chemistry; and the 2003 ACS H. C. Brown Award for
Creative Research in Synthetic Methods. In recognition of his
outstanding teaching skills, Wender was named recipient of the 1991
Associated Students of Stanford University Teaching Award, the 1991
Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching, the 1992 Bing Teaching
Award and the 2000 Dean's Award for Distinguished
Teaching.